I went to look at r/mechanicalpencils this evening and ewww. I realize that user interface is something that only ever gets worse, but really. Why so much wasted space? Why are there pictures showing? Why can I see only 4 posts at one time? Or, is it just me?
Slack’s recent “update” wastes more space than the previous version, but this is ridiculous.
Going back to usenet using tin soon.
You went to it on desktop, mobile, app?
This platform offers a few things that the subreddit doesn’t but I do wish the subreddit was a bit more useful and enjoyable. I actually unsubscribed from it for a while. There’s just something that’s not right with it anymore. But that may be all of Reddit.
Of course desktop! If the desktop is available I am using it. This place is better but on desktop there is also alot of empty space. At least the signal to noise is better here. r/mechanicalpencils is not great and has not been since the boycott, but other groups are good-ish or at least have a history of good content.
The new layout actually makes my eyes hurt (and not just in the visually offensive ui sense). new.reddit.com has the old format but does not remember what you have read. 
I use old.reddit.com on the desktop.
Nice. It is very tight but go to comments and you are stepping in a big pile of gui poo. I think I did see a setting for that though.
Yeah, it’s weird. The interface is rather dramatically changed, at least for web browser views. I prefer working on a 15" screen. The trouble with going to “old.reddit.com” is that it’s the really old style, which I cannot stand (and it also doesn’t support dark mode).
Dark mode is terrible for your eye muscles. There are tons of studies about this from the early 2000s.
We moved away from this cursed modality around 2007, but unfortunately, our society has zero historical memory and is now re-obsessed with a trend that causes macular degeneration.
Interesting. I don’t use dark mode, because I had the impression it didn’t help my eyes and because I am old enough to remember the old black-green monstrosities.
My company has dark presentation templates at the moment, which I boycott. I find it just terrible for presentations.
I visited reddit/mp a few minutes ago to check. For me (desktop) everything is unchanged and ok?!? I use the list view of topics, which is fine. Unfortunately reddit does not work like a forum (discussion entries don’t bubble up entries), but that’s by design. The subreddit admins adapted the settings in good ways, e.g., topics don’t get closed so early.
BTW What I learned there today is that the Dive Purple will be launched at 2023-11-24.
After poking around in r/help it seems that not everyone is getting the new layout. They are selectively making select people use it. There is a setting that can be used to indicate that one does not want to be part of a beta program but this is being ignored.
I’ve completely stopped posting on Reddit since they pulled that “black screen” crap with moderators a while back.
I need to get in the habit of posting here, but it’s not a 1:1 match for my workflow because [1] I don’t use my phone to access Knockology, and [2] posting images from the phone is significantly easier than sending to desktop, converting from .heic to .jpg, and then posting the images on the forums.
Sucks 
Edit: Yes, I know I can change my iPhone’s settings to save as .jpg and not .heic, but the steps involved are still more of a PITA than simply posting from your photo library.
I have a Telegram channel that’s just for me that I use to transfer files and images to myself. What I like about it is I can drop a photo from my phone into the Telegram channel and Telegram will convert it to a jpeg for me. From Telegram desktop I just copy the image and paste it into the forum.
I’d not heard of this before.
I don’t find I have any eye strain at all using dark mode. In principle, your eyes are moving and focusing on the same things. The advantage of dark mode is that it’s not super bright, which I find actually easier on my eyes at night. Plus, it consumes less power from a display device on battery mode.
Just a quick Google search shows this isn’t necessarily an ironed-out thing. Both types of displays can have challenges, depending on a person’s eye conditions.
Summary: In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
The human pupil is the gateway to the retina: through it, light reaches the eye. By default, the human pupil changes size depending on the amount of light in the environment: when there is a lot of light, it contracts and becomes narrower, and when it’s dark, it dilates to allow more light to get in.
When researchers looked at fatigue metrics, they concluded that there was no significant difference of contrast polarity on any of them (meaning that it wasn’t the case that dark mode made people more tired, or vice versa).
The study found that lighting, polarity, and text size all had an effect on performance — in the direction perhaps expected by now: simulated daytime led to faster judgements than simulated nighttime, light mode was better than dark mode, and bigger font was faster than smaller font. The interesting result was the significant interaction between ambient lighting and contrast polarity: during daytime, there was no significant effect of contrast polarity, but during nighttime, light mode led to better performance than dark mode. Moreover, during nighttime it was much harder for people to read small-font text in dark mode than in light mode.
An intriguing study published in Nature Research’s Scientific Reports in 2018 suggests that sustained exposure to light-mode may be associated with myopia. Myopia (or nearsightedness) refers to the inability to see far objects clearly and is strongly correlated with the level of education and with reading. In their study, Andrea Aleman and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany asked 7 human participants to read text presented in dark mode and light mode for an hour each. To see if their predisposition to myopia changed after reading, they measured the thickness of the choroid, a vascular membrane behind the retina. The thinning of the choroid is associated with myopia.x
A WIRED article, HERE, says Dark Mode is not all it’s cracked up to be and may actually be worse… but, it’s a “pop-science” magazine and isn’t known for it’s definitive medically oriented accuracy.
In reality, I use mixed modes across apps and devices. For example, while I use dark mode on Reddit, there’s only light mode on Knockology. My eyes adjust. If it’s too bright, I just tone down the brightness control. My Kindle Paperwhite is light mode only, but it has a phenomenal brightness and tint control. I can easily read it in very dim light.
From all I’ve read, the greatest problem with using these devices is focusing too much on them without a break… which can induce myopia over time. It’s important to break away at least every 30 minutes and focus on long range viewing outside, if you can.
I rarely post images from my phone directly to a forum. Mainly, I don’t want to post very large resolution. I often prefer to crop, too. And while the phone provides an editor to do some of that, it can’t do what Photoshop can do.
I send photos to a secondary email account, by simply opening up the email app and saving a new email with photo attachments to DRAFT. I then pop onto my laptop, go to the email account and download the images from the draft message. Very easy way to transfer.
I don’t know about the studies, but when I started getting floaters in my eyes I switched to light foreground and dark background in my xterms. This was mostly before there was a “dark mode” that one could switch to on demand. It was way less distracting.
I use photoshop on my phone constantly. Lightroom, too. Works amazingly well.